Minnesota and the Dewitt Wallace Center
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 10:41 am
Over the past two years Archive-It, Internet Archive’s web archiving service, has partnered with researchers at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of for Media and Democracy at Duke University in a project designed to evaluate the health of local media ecosystems as part of the News Measures Research Project, funded by the Democracy Fund. The project is led by Phil Napoli at Duke University and Matthew Weber at University of Minnesota.
Project staff worked with Archive-It to crawl and archive the homepages of 663 local news websites representing 100 communities across the United States. Seven crawls were run on single days from July through September and captured over 2.2TB of unique data and 16 million URLs. Initial findings from the research detail how local communities cover core topics such europe cell phone number list as emergencies, politics and transportation. Additional findings look at the volume of local news produced by different media outlets, and show the importance of local newspapers in providing communities with relevant content.
The goal of the News Measures Research Project is to examine the health of local community news by analyzing the amount and type of local news coverage in a sample of community. In order to generate a random and unbiased sample of communities, the team used US Census data. Prior research suggested that average income in a community is correlated with the amount of local news coverage; thus the team decided to focus on three different income brackets (high, medium and low) using the Census data to break up the communities into categories.
Rural areas and major cities were eliminated from the sample in order to reduce the number of outliers; this left a list of 1,559 communities ranging in population from 20,000 to 300,000 and in average household income from $21,000 to $215,000. Next, a random sample of 100 communities was selected, and a rigorous search process was applied to build a list of 663 news outlets that cover local news in those communities (based on Web searches and established directories such as Cision).
Project staff worked with Archive-It to crawl and archive the homepages of 663 local news websites representing 100 communities across the United States. Seven crawls were run on single days from July through September and captured over 2.2TB of unique data and 16 million URLs. Initial findings from the research detail how local communities cover core topics such europe cell phone number list as emergencies, politics and transportation. Additional findings look at the volume of local news produced by different media outlets, and show the importance of local newspapers in providing communities with relevant content.
The goal of the News Measures Research Project is to examine the health of local community news by analyzing the amount and type of local news coverage in a sample of community. In order to generate a random and unbiased sample of communities, the team used US Census data. Prior research suggested that average income in a community is correlated with the amount of local news coverage; thus the team decided to focus on three different income brackets (high, medium and low) using the Census data to break up the communities into categories.
Rural areas and major cities were eliminated from the sample in order to reduce the number of outliers; this left a list of 1,559 communities ranging in population from 20,000 to 300,000 and in average household income from $21,000 to $215,000. Next, a random sample of 100 communities was selected, and a rigorous search process was applied to build a list of 663 news outlets that cover local news in those communities (based on Web searches and established directories such as Cision).